


Dark of the Moon

by escritoireazul



Category: Skinwalkers (2006)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Forced Humanity, Sonja Lives, Trick or Treat: Extra Treat, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 09:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21242120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/pseuds/escritoireazul
Summary: Sonja digs into her skin, shoves claws through muscle, searches for the bullet. It burns inside, sickens her, and the pain rises like a flashfire burning dry wood. Blood gushes. She can taste it, bitter and sick with silver. That boy's blood is on her tongue, a bit of his skin between her teeth.The fire burns bright, chasing her into nothingness.





	Dark of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girlsarewolves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlsarewolves/gifts).

Sonja digs into her skin, shoves claws through muscle, searches for the bullet. It burns inside, sickens her, and the pain rises like a flashfire burning dry wood. Blood gushes. She can taste it, bitter and sick with silver. That boy's blood is on her tongue, a bit of his skin between her teeth.

The fire burns bright, chasing her into nothingness.

  
  
  
  
When she wakes, it’s to low voices, the smell of gun oil and bullets and blood, and a stiff mattress. She’s bound not with leather and chains but with bandages pressed tight across wounds. There’s no pull of dried blood against her lips, gluing her eyes shut, coating her hands. She’s washed clean, outside and in. She’s been stripped. She’s not wearing her own clothes.

Sonja sits up. The voices fall quiet. The rustle of cloth and the soft scrape of metal stills.

She’s in a motel room, on one of two narrow beds. That  _ boy _ is on the other bed, half sitting up, supported by the pillows behind him. His mother draws blood from him, filling one small vial at a time.

Varek sprawls at the rickety table shoved up under the window, slumped in the wooden chair, legs spread wide. The table is covered in guns, and he sets aside the one he’s cleaning. Focuses on her.

Sonja scrambles into a crouch in the center of the bed. Wobbles and has to put her hands down to catch herself before she falls. Everything hurts, and she has no strength. She snarls, but it doesn’t sound right, doesn’t feel right. It’s weak and thin when it finally tears from her throat.

That woman, Rachel keeps working, but her gaze flicks toward Sonja over and over. She has a gun close by. Before, Sonja could have closed the distance between them even before Rachel grabbed it, much less aimed and fired. Now, her body unbalanced, weak, shaky, she doesn’t trust herself at all.

“Eat something,” Varek says and stands. Collects a couple hamburgers from next to the television. “Sorry they’re cold.”

He comes close to the bed, putting himself between her and Rachel and Rachel’s gun.

“Caleb!” Rachel snaps, but he doesn’t move. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t acknowledge the warning at all.

“Eat,” Varek says again, his voice low. He holds them out to her. Sonja doesn’t want them. She wants hot flesh and fresh blood, wants a human heart bursting with flavor. Wants him to show his claws and his fangs and his fury.

She takes the burgers. He goes back to his chair. She eats her food, sullen, head down, not looking at anyone, though she keeps Rachel in her peripheral vision.

She wipes congealed grease from her mouth when she’s done. Balls up the wrappers. Considers chucking them at Rachel’s head, but decides it won’t do her any good.

Rachel finishes drawing blood and carefully bandages the small wound. That boy sits up, rubbing his arm. He looks at Sonja, eyes too big for his pinched face.

“Walk with me,” Varek says. That boy looks at him. Rachel keeps her eyes on Sonja. Sonja looks down. “Sonja,” he adds. “Walk with me.”

She eases off the far side of the bed, reluctant to test her balance again, but her body seems more settled. She doesn’t skirt around the edge of the room, won’t show that kind of weakness, but she does angle herself so she can always see Rachel and Rachel’s gun.

Varek waits until she’s close to open the door. Lets her walk through it first. Closes it behind them.

Away from the close heat of the room, Sonja relaxes some. Varek starts walking, and she takes three big steps to get back to his side.

Neither of them says anything until they’re well away from the motel, wandering into an open field gone to seed, grass high enough to brush her knees. Varek stops. She does too and turns to him.

The moon overhead is just past full. She can no longer feel it plucking at her nerves.

She wants to ask, but she doesn’t need to. She knows. She knows what they’ve done.

“I didn’t want this,” she says. Despite herself, her voice breaks.

“I know.” Varek is gentle as he looks at her. This isn’t the Varek of late, lost in their search to stop the boy. He was softer sometimes before the months started ticking away into weeks and days and hours. Softer like he is now. “I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not!” She spits the words at him. “You should be, but, god, you want this now.”

He shrugs. “I am sorry. This wasn’t meant for you. It wasn’t meant for me, but we’re here now.”

“You  _ did _ this! You did this to me, or you let her do it to me. It’s not an accident.” She’s not sure which scenario is worse. It doesn’t really matter. In the end, something was done to her, something that tore through her body and changed her, something terrible that made her less than she was before.

He shakes his head. “No. You bit Timothy. You swallowed his blood. One bite, one drop, that’s enough.”

She stares at him, horrified. That’s not how it works. Biting a human -- and that boy is a human, werewolf father or not, he’s more human than beast -- is good and right, it sates hunger and thirst, it satisfies all sorts of cravings.

Biting a human doesn’t change her. It can’t.

She looks down at her hands, furless and clawless. Fragile.

“I can’t be this,” she whispers.

“I know.”

  
  
  
  
They stand together in the field in silence for a long time after. Sonja looks anywhere but at him. Varek’s gaze on her is steady, his presence calm. Finally, she turns back to him.

“What the hell do I do now?” she asks. “You’re going hunting, aren’t you? I’m not stupid, I know what you’re going to do with the blood and the guns.”

He opens his mouth, but she doesn’t give him time to refute it, to defend himself, to say anything at all.

“How can you do this?” she cries, voice too loud now. “You wanted to kill him to stop this! You wanted to be free! How can you take that away from anyone else?”

He sighs. “I don’t know. I can’t let them kill him, and they will.”

“So keep him safe! Hide him! You’re better than any of them, even like this. Don’t force them to become -- this. Weak.  _ Human _ .” She snarls the last word, trying to get the taste of it off her tongue.

“They’ll keep coming. You know that.” He doesn’t say they were that, but she knows that, too.

“You can’t force them to change just because you’ve decided it’s okay to be weak!” She balls her hands into fists. “You can’t do this to them, Varek! We can’t have it anymore, and I hate that, but you can’t take it away from everyone else, too.” She hates it so much she might die from it, her rage burning her away now that her body isn’t strong enough to contain her hate.

“I have to do this,” Varek says.

Sonja snarls. It’s not satisfying, not like this. She swings at him, the only release she has left from this anger.

Varek sees it coming. He always sees it coming. He knows her too well. He catches her punch and jerks her into him, wraps his arms around her. They’re chest to chest, and she finds herself with her face tucked against his throat. She bares her teeth, opens her mouth against his skin. She has no fangs, but if she bit hard enough, chewed through his flesh, surely she could still rip out his throat.

He kisses the top of her head. The scent of him surrounds her. It’s almost like going back to what she was, and all the fight drains out of her.

“I can’t help you do this to them,” she mumbles. “They’d be better off dead.”

“I don’t think so.” His breath stirs her hair. “You’re alive, and I’m glad. I’m alive, too.”

She makes an inarticulate noise, all her words abandoning her.

It doesn’t matter. He keeps going. “I can’t make you do it. I wouldn’t try. But I want you with me.”

Sonja gentles the bite into a nip that will bruise his skin and nothing more. Breathes him in. Closes her eyes.

“Fuck,” she says on a breath. “Fuck you. Fuck this. Fuck everything.”

He holds her tight. She thinks of Grenier and his bird flying free, Zo’s smirk and how often she wanted to smack it off him, riding fast, hair in the wind, road unspooling before them, blood in her mouth, down her throat, smeared over her body and Varek’s, over her body and Varek’s and the boys’.

“Fuck you, Varek,” she says, voice shaking.

“I know.” He kisses the top of her head again. 

Sonja hates herself a little, and maybe, soon, a lot, but she’s lost everything else. She won’t let him go.

She straightens so she can look him in the eye, but doesn’t pull away. “I will warn them if I can,” she says. “And I will never pull the trigger.”

He nods.

“I’m going to fuck you until you’re so exhausted you can’t move to shoot anyone either.”

Varek laughs. That’s familiar. Kisses her. That’s familiar too.

Sonja bites at his mouth and lets herself be satisfied with him, with this tiny bit of normalcy. Everything else, she can fight her way through later. Varek is here, and hers, and human or not, she knows everything he was before still lingers inside.


End file.
